Conservation

Cameroon, with its vast bio-diverse forests and key great ape habitat, is being eyed as a prime site for oil palm production, making it a center of agro-industry development in Africa. Conservationists hope to avoid mistakes made in Asia.

Conservationists in Africa are working to implement oil palm standards that will limit deforestation, protect biodiversity, limit carbon emissions, and benefit smallholders, while also supporting economic growth and job creation.

A key to Africa’s sustainable oil palm production is the implementation of mutually agreed upon industry-wide, and possibly nationwide, sustainable standards for siting and development of plantations.

Standards being tested are: the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) that identifies High Conservation Value areas; a system favored by WWF using integrated land-use planning / smallholders; and Zero Deforestation (ZD) favored by Greenpeace.

A baby gorilla. As an agro-industrial oil palm production boom looks set to hit Africa, Critically Endangered gorillas are under threat. Photo by Rhett A. Butler

Scientists have discovered at least 500 Critically Endangered grey-shanked doucs in Vietnam — their only home — boosting species estimates to up to 1,500 animals

Photo copyright: Nguyen Van Truong/Fauna & Flora International

Grey-shanked doucs live in the forest canopy of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Their numbers have been severely reduced by habitat loss and fragmentation, along with hunting for food and the pet trade.

Fauna & Flora International (FFI) researchers located the 500+ animals in several subpopulations within the Kon Tum forest, which provides important connectivity to protected areas to the south and north, and across the border into Cambodia.

FFI Vietnam is now developing a conservation strategy which may include ecotourism and forest patrols for the newly discovered population. Vietnam is home to 11 Critically Endangered primate species, and a priority for primate conservation in Southeast Asia and the world.

The long-limbed, canopy-swinging, duet-singing gibbons of Southeast Asia are under threat as industrial agriculture eats into their forest habitat. Palm oil plantation expansion is famously bad news for all sorts of wildlife, as are the new sugar and rubber plantations also driving deforestation across the region. But gibbon species are especially vulnerable: the cutting of trees makes their favored high-flying locomotion impossible — a potentially fatal plight for this overlooked great ape.

Finding the balance between economic development, industrial agricultural production, and great ape conservation is an urgent challenge facing governments and conservation organizations in many parts of Asia and Africa, as highlighted by the recent report, “State of the Apes: Industrial Agriculture and Ape Conservation”.

One such struggle is playing out in the Northern Plains of Cambodia, where the Pileated Gibbon (Hylobates pileatus) is the ape at risk. There, a mixture of evergreen and deciduous forest is home to not only H. pileatus, but a host of other species pressured by encroaching agribusiness. This besieged region includes one of the largest remnants of deciduous dipterocarp forest — dubbed the Central Indochina Dry Forest ecoregion — that once extended across much of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

A little while ago I wrote about the plight of Amazon river dolphins in the face of dam-building across the region. Here’s the opening few lines, but to read the whole piece please follow the link to the original on Mongabay. A National Geographic photographer kindly let us use some of his pictures, so it is worth a look!

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A dam-building boom is underway in the Amazon. More than 400 hydroelectric dams are in operation, being built, or planned for the river’s headwaters and basin. Scientists know that tropical dams disrupt water flow and nutrient deposition, with negative consequences for aquatic animals, especially migratory species. But little detailed knowledge exists as to the impacts of dams on specific species, or as to the best mitigations to prevent harm.

A recent study that tries to fill in that knowledge gap zeroes in on Brazil’s river dolphins. It found that as many as 26 dams could negatively impact dolphin populations and their prey.

The research, led by Dr Claryana Araújo of the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, focused on two freshwater species: the Amazon River Dolphin, or boto (Inia geoffrensis), which is sometimes famously pink; and the Tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis).

The river dolphins of South America are charismatic emblems of rainforest biodiversity, and have captured the public imagination. Swimming in rivers, lagoons, and among submerged tree trunks in flooded forests to chase down prey, they can be found as far inland as the upper reaches of Amazonian tributaries, more than 2,600 kilometers (1,615 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean.

Climb into a canoe at dawn, paddle into the reed beds of Madagascar’s largest wetland, and with luck you could see a unique primate: the Alaotra Gentle Lemur (Hapalemur alaotrensis). Known locally as the bandro and described by Gerald Durrell as a “honey-coloured teddy bear”, these lemurs spend their entire lives within the cyperus and reed stems of the marsh around Lake Alaotra in Eastern Madagascar.

“What really fascinates me [is] that this lemur species is the only primate that lives constantly on water,” Patrick Waeber, of Madagascar Wildlife Conservation (MWC) told mongabay.com. Waeber, also a lecturer at ETH Zurich, knows the species better than most, first studying their social behavior in 2000. “It was during over 160 sampling hours that I initially came to know this compelling lemur species intimately.”

The bandro is the largest of the gentle lemurs, weighing a little over 2.5

The Alaotra Gentle Lemur is the only primate that lives exclusively within a wetland habitat. Photo credit Toby Nowlan.

pounds. Their dense fur grows grey on face, chest, and ears; a rich brown on head and back. A long tail helps with balance on the floating vegetation of the marsh. The animals live in small territorial family groups, and, as is typical of many lemurs, females are dominant.

People pressure driving decline

With their range extending to just 20,000 hectares (49,421 acres), their population declining, and habitat highly threatened, the species has been classified as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Their unique ecology and threatened status have also earned them a place on the EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) mammal list, a program run by the Zoological Society of London that “highlights and conserves one-of-a-kind species that are on the verge of extinction.”

“We currently estimate between 2,000 to 2,500 Bandro,” Lance Woolaver told mongabay.com. He is the head of Species Conservation and Research at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (Durrell) Madagascar. Durrell initiated some of the first studies of the bandro in the early 1990s.

“Research showed it was endangered and completely dependent on the remaining marsh,” Woolaver said. Back then, the population was estimated to be 11,000 – they have declined by almost 80 percent – and hunting for bushmeat was their greatest direct threat. In an attempt to curb hunting, Durrell reached out to the local people, holding environmental festivals to “engage local communities, discuss the importance of the marshes and demonstrate the uniqueness of the lemur to Alaotra.” This outreach was successful, with habitat loss and fragmentation – which isolates groups of bandro – now overtaking hunting as the biggest problem facing the species.

Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Secretary General of GERP (the Madagascar Primate Group) started working to conserve the bandro in 2003, and still remembers his first encounter of the bandro in the wild. “The first individual/group we saw… for me, was like discovering a diamond,” Ratsimbazafy told mongabay.com.

A young Alaotra Gentle Lemur. Photo credit: Arnaud De Grave.

Ratsimbazafy also serves as the co-vice chair of the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group for Madagascar, which has identified Alaotra as one of 33 priority sites for lemur conservation. He explained what drives habitat loss today: “People convert the marsh into rice field, but before doing that, they burn the marsh…. and certainly many bandro are caught in the fire.”

The marshes are burned not only to make way for rice fields, but also to improve access to fishing grounds, which are suffering from invasive plant species encroachment. “A major threat to the marsh and lake comes from an exponential increase in the number of people relying on the lake for fishing,” Woolaver said. Erosion in the lake’s headwaters is also a problem. “The lake’s long-term future depends on managing the surrounding hillsides which, due to deforestation, pour silt into the lake.”

The Alaotra wetland is at the heart of Madagascar’s “rice bowl” region, which produces a third of the national rice harvest. The lake is also a nationally important freshwater fishery. “The Alaotra was once the biggest inland fish supplier, but these stocks are now imperiled,” Waeber explained. In a country of extreme poverty these natural resources are vital in the deepest sense of the word. But exploiting them has a major impact on Alaotra’s biodiversity.

Two of the world’s rarest mammals

Alaotra’s ecological importance is not limited to the bandro. Numerous rare and endemic species inhabit the wetland, including Meller’s Duck (Endangered), and the endemic Madagascar Rainbowfish (Vulnerable). Others have already vanished, such as the Madagascar Pochard (Critically Endangered) and the Alaotra Grebe, which was declared extinct in 2010.

But even as these species struggle for survival, startling new discoveries are being made. In 2004 researchers realized that an aquatic, mongoose-like mammal observed swimming in the marshes was unknown to science. Formally described in the same year that the Alaotra Grebe’s extinction was confirmed, Durrell’s Vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) was the first new species of carnivorous mammal to be discovered in 24 years. And that’s not all. “There is also an undescribed species of mouse lemur probably unique to the marshes of Alaotra,” Woolaver said.

A live-trapped Durrell’s Vontsira just after release. Photo credit BioCensus.

So far, little is known about the cat-sized Durrell’s Vontsira. It has physical adaptations to its aquatic habitat such as enlarged paws, which distinguish it from its forest-dwelling relative, the Brown-tailed Mongoose (Salanoia concolor). Knowledge of its population – estimated at fewer than 465 individuals – and its behavior is gradually accumulating thanks to weekly marsh patrols established by Durrell to monitor the bandro, the Vontsira, and illegal activities. “Camera-trapping and live-trapping have also been trialed and work well with this species,” Woolaver added.

With such low population densities, seeing either the bandro or the Vontsira in the dense marsh grasses requires a great deal of luck. What are the chances, then, of witnessing an interaction between two of the rarest mammals in the world?

“I was lucky to encounter a Salanoia [Vontsira] with one of my bandro groups back in 2000,” Waeber recalls. “The group consisted of three adults and two juveniles. The Salanoia was targeting the little ones. The adults shushed them up a cyperus to be out of reach by the carnivore. At the same time, the three adults surrounded the attacker and charged it continuously. After some minutes, annoyed by the continuous attacks, the carnivore gave up and went off.”

The global significance of Alaotra’s biodiversity was recognized in 2003, when the entire 722,500 hectare (2,790 square mile) watershed was designated a Ramsar site – recognized under the Ramsar Convention, an international wetland preservation treaty. In 2007, with the help of Durrell and other NGOs, the region was afforded further protection by the creation of a community-managed New Protected Area.

“Despite these protective designations, burning for conversion to agricultural land-use (i.e., rice production) is steadily and rapidly reducing the amount of potential lemur habitat,” Waeber said. About 6 percent of marsh habitat is lost every year.

“Marshes can recover from burning,” Waeber continued, but “because the frequency and number of fires are increasing, the chances of proper recovery of the marshes is decreasing.”

Community based management

Finding a way to balance people’s needs with the conservation of biodiversity is the key conundrum facing organizations working in the region. “Alaotra is one of Durrell’s core conservation zones in Madagascar, and the challenges there really exemplify the issues faced by conservation projects in Madagascar,” Woolaver said. “A major conservation challenge is to ensure secure livelihoods for these local communities that want to sustainably manage the lake and marshlands.”

Durrell’s Vontsira, formally described in 2010, was the first new carnivorous mammal to be discovered in 24 years. Photo credit Lance Woolaver.

Durrell’s early efforts to engage local communities provided the foundation for community-based management of the marshes. Durrell was instrumental in the establishment of 28 community associations which now manage 90 percent of the 23,000 hectares (56,834 acres) of marsh that remain.

A pioneering participatory ecological monitoring project was also developed, which provided communities with improved education, food security and access to clean water. “This program collected distribution data on biodiversity, and also improved relationships with local communities and encouraged them to protect the marsh,” Woolaver said.

More recently, Durrell has been providing capacity-building support for the establishment of the New Protected Area. “We want to make sure that the New Protected Area becomes a tool for sustainable management of the marsh and lake, by local communities themselves,” Woolaver explained. Durrell’s other priorities include making sure the boundaries of the protected area are clear, with “rebuilding of law enforcement and the trust between local communities and authorities” and “continuing to work with local communities to ensure good fishing management, and improved agriculture yields.”

Alaotra Gentle Lemur. Photo credit: Alice Smith.

“In order to do this we do need significant levels of engagement and long-term financial support from major development organizations and donors,” Woolaver said.

GERP, the Madagascar Primate Group, also focuses on supporting people who rely on the wetland for their livelihood. “We work with the local communities in the form of collaboration, but not dependence,” Ratsimbazafy emphasized. “We know that their involvement to the success of the project is crucial, so we provide training in farming/handcraft techniques, good governance, patrol activities, and monitoring of bandro and the habitats, for instance.”

On the eastern shore of the lake, near the town of Andreba, lies Parc Bandro, a protected area of 80 hectares (198 acres) managed by MWC. “With the consent of the community, we have built Camp Bandro to allow visitors to stay overnight, [and] to be at the lake and in the marshes by sunrise. This is the prime time for lemur watching,” Waeber explained.

A night at the Camp, followed by a dawn canoe excursion in search of the Parc’s roughly 170 bandro, will set you back just under $7. “The underpinning idea is to show the Andreba community the link between conservation… and the increased numbers of tourists.”

Unfortunately, as Waeber acknowledges, the logistical difficulties of reaching the area mean that few tourists make the journey. “Tourism in Madagascar works fine for only less than a handful of national parks which generate the majority of revenue…. [A]t Camp Bandro, we have had in the past years on average between 50 to 80 tourists.”

MWC has also been looking to the future. Training the next generation of Malagasy conservationists is a priority. Working in collaboration with both Durrell and GERP, MWC will enable 10 Malagasy students to undertake Master’s research on the bandro’s ecology and conservation.

Celebrating World Environment Day in Alaotra. Photo credit: Durrell.

An environmental education program aimed at primary school children and teachers has also been developed, with 3,000 comic books entitled Arovy fa harena (Protect because it’s worth it) distributed to schools so far. “The children experiencing environmental education are clearly more aware of the lake biodiversity,” Waeber said.

A cooperative solution to preservation

Increasing engagement with local communities is crucial, but they alone will not determine the fate of the Alaotra. Much of the destruction of the marsh is driven by people outside the region.

“Lack of law enforcement has led to land-grabbing by powerful people, most of whom are not even from the local communities around Alaotra,” Woolaver explained.

“That is why we try to find ways to empower the local communities,” Ratsimbazafy said. Furthermore, he thinks the law should be applied equally to all.

“In a complex socio-ecological system such as the Alaotra, conservation needs to engage with a multitude of actors,” Waeber contends. “We also need to bring our conservation efforts to the attention of the actors of change; the policy and decision makers.”

To this end, Waeber and Madagascan collaborators have launched the AlaReLa (Alaotra Resilience Landscape) project, to help resource users and decision-makers “find a balance between conservation and development, and thereby improve the adaptive capacity of Alaotra‘s social-ecological landscape.”

When it comes to the outlook for Alaotra’s people and biodiversity, there is optimism. But secure livelihoods, financial support, and political will are all needed for the region to thrive. “As long as the people depending on the marshland system are struggling to make a living, the ecosystem is at high risk to reach a point of no return,” Waeber warned. “Bridging cultural, ecological and agricultural values and needs will be key to conserving the bandro and other species such asSalanoia durrelli.”

“The two species can be saved from extinction, it isn’t too late by any means,” Woolaver concluded. “All of the knowledge, experience and techniques have been developed and are there to save the bandro and Vontsira, but a major concentrated and integrated effort requiring financial support will be required.” And if these flagship species can be saved, the rest of Alaotra’s biodiversity can be saved alongside them.

Alaotra Gentle Lemurs are threatened by the loss of their wetland habitat as it is burned to make way for rice fields. Photo credit Toby Nowlan.

These are some of the questions that a new multidisciplinary project aims to address. People and Reforestation in the Tropics: a Network for Education, Research, and Synthesis (PARTNERS) aims to ‘to help scientists, governments, and peoples around the world understand and plan for sustainable and socially responsible tropical forest regrowth.’ Led by Robin Chazdon, an expert in tropical forest regeneration, PARTNERS brings together biologists, geographers, social and political scientists, economists, and NGOs, in recognition of the fact that is the interaction between people and forests that not only determines how forests are cut down or degraded, but also how they regrow.

It was a privilege to participate in the network’s inaugural workshop held at the University of Connecticut in May. The main themes we focused on were how to achieve resilient reforestation, how reforestation can both mitigate and adapt to climate change, what drives different land transitions, and what might the consequences of these be for forest recovery, and what are the synergies and trade-offs between different outcomes when reforestation is undertaken. For more information you can read about the recent workshop here, and about the network in more depth here.

An assessment of ocean acidification, presented at the UN Climate Change Conference in Warsaw in November 2013, starkly concluded that acidity is on track to rise 170 percent by the end of this century. As many key species are sensitive to changes in acidity, this would drastically impact ocean ecosystems, with effects especially pronounced in polar regions where the cold waters intensify acidification, and which are home to many organisms that are particularly vulnerable to acidification.The ocean acts as a giant sink for carbon, absorbing 24 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every day. Since industrialization, approximately 30 percent of anthropogenic (human generated) CO2 has been absorbed in this way. In the context of climate change this is incredibly important, as the amount of atmospheric CO2 is directly linked to global temperatures. But as CO2 is absorbed, the pH of the water decreases, and it becomes more acidic. Compared with pre-industrial levels, the ocean’s acidity has soared 26 percent, and will only increase as CO2 emissions rise. Not only will this likely injure marine ecosystems, but the more acidic the water becomes the less it is capable of absorbing carbon, thereby exacerbating CO2 emissions.

In addition to ecosystem damage, ocean acidification could bring about significant economic losses.

“People who rely on the ocean’s ecosystem services – often in developing countries – are especially vulnerable,” stated a press release by the International Council for Science.

The report’s authors represented the largest-ever gathering of ocean acidification scientists, with 540 experts representing 37 countries contributing to the discussion of acidification research. They found that the current rate of acidification is unprecedented, and is ten times faster than at any other time in the last 55 million years.

With the changing chemistry of the oceans comes a myriad of cascading effects. Coral reefs may start to erode faster than they are being built. Species that rely on calcification to build their shells and skeletons – using forms of calcium carbonate – may find acidic waters too corrosive to survive. This means the shellfish industry will likely suffer as mollusks (including mussels and oysters) are among the organisms most sensitive to acidification. And with other factors also changing at the same time, such as temperature, overfishing, and pollution levels, the cumulative effects are likely to be even more pronounced.

As CO2 is more soluble in colder water, the polar oceans are especially vulnerable. Not only are these regions suffering the greatest impacts of acidification today, they also act as an indicator of how acidification may impact warmer oceans in the future.

A key question in acidification research is the effect of acidity not only on individual species, but on the entire marine ecosystem. One way to assess this is by investigating how organisms at the bottom of the food chain are dealing with decreasing pH, since their health and abundance is vital for the health of the ecosystem as a whole.

An intrepid research expedition to the high Canadian Arctic in 2011 aimed to address this question by studying copepods, small crustaceans that form the dominant zooplankton in the Arctic Ocean. The investigations were led by scientists from the University of Exeter and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK, and their results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). They indicate that the range of pH levels copepods experience in their daily lives may predict the extent to which they will be able to cope with rises in acidity: those with the most specialized requirements may struggle to survive, while more generalist species may well be able to cope in the future.

“Our study found that some marine animals may not be able to survive the impact of ocean acidification, particularly the early-life stages,” said Ceri Lewis from the University of Exeter. “This unique insight into how marine life will respond to future changes in the oceans has implications that reach far beyond the Arctic regions.”

By teaming up with the Catlin Arctic Survey – a collaboration between explorers and scientists – a crucial gap in scientific knowledge could be addressed: what happens to these organisms under the ice during the Arctic winter? Conducting research during this time is extremely challenging, but understanding what happens then may be particularly important.

“If we don’t understand what goes on over the whole seasonal cycle (and there are very few winter studies) then we have no way of knowing how and what is changing, and why. In winter, there will still be sea ice even if it does eventually all melt in summer. It will always be dark and there will also be food limitations,” Helen Findlay, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, told mongabay.com.

Drawings of different copepods. Photo in the US public domain.

“This is therefore an incredibly harsh time of year for any organism living in the Arctic, and as organisms are potentially most vulnerable at this time of year, we need to understand how they survive this time,” Findlay continued. “We were fortunate to get the opportunity to take part in the Catlin Arctic Survey, who wanted to team scientists up with explorers to undertake this difficult fieldwork. Without their support we wouldn’t have had the ice base facility and ability to go to the location in the high Arctic at that time of year.”

The team spent two months camping in sub-zero temperatures to undertake their research, which involved drilling through 1.6 meters (5.3 feet) of ice to collect samples of copepods to determine how their presence and abundance changes at various ocean depths. Although the conditions were almost unimaginably harsh, the experience was not without its rewards.

“Actually, it was amazing. It was quite strenuous both physically and mentally; keeping on top of everything for two months at constant temperatures below minus 25 ºC (-15 ºF) was quite a challenge. Especially as we were sleeping in unheated tents – just a sleeping bag and thermo-rest between us and the ice,” said Findlay. “On a trip like this the hours are long and you don’t really get a day off, but the rewards are that you are living and working in a beautiful environment with amazing wind and light conditions, gathering data that no-one else has collected before you.”

The researchers took samples from a range of depths down to 200 meters (650 feet) below the surface, and monitored the response of both adult and nauplii (early life stage) copepods to pH and CO2 levels that are predicted to occur in the next 100 years.

The sampling revealed distinct layers in the water chemistry, with highest CO2 and lowest pH at around 100 meters (325 feet) below the surface. Adult copepods from the endemic genus Calanus were found to migrate over the whole 200-meter range of sampling, and were thus exposed to a broad range of CO2 and pH conditions. Fortunately, these species did not suffer higher mortality in experiments that imitated future high acidity environments. But adults of the smaller, globally distributed copepod Oithona similis were found to be restricted to the upper 50 meters (150 feet) of the ocean, meaning that they live in a relatively constant environment in comparison with Calanus species. Survival was significantly reduced for Oithona similis in the experiments; its global distribution means that the implications of this could be far reaching.

A photo of a Copepod – Photo by Uwe Kils, provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Importantly, scientists only found the larval stages of all species in the upper layer of the water column. These responded in a similar way to adult Oithona similis, with reduced survival at high CO2 experimental treatments.

“It seems that copepods that are smaller, or earlier in their life stages, tend not to experience as wide ranging variability as large adults, and this makes them vulnerable to [environmental] shifts,” said Findlay. “The small stuff (copepods and their nauplii) are still very important parts of the food chain, with larger zooplankton and other organisms eating them, so indirectly a decline in these types of organisms could impact the food chain. More directly, if the nauplii (the early life stages) are not able to survive, then there won’t be any adults!”

The effect of increasing acidity and CO2 concentrations on individual copepods is not completely understood, but scientists believe a lack of food in the winter may cause higher mortality, as well as direct effects from pH and CO2 changes on their biological processes.

“These types of small simple organisms do not have very complicated internal structures like a blood system to regulate internal CO2 and pH conditions, both of which are important for things like enzyme activity, ion balance, and many other physiological processes,” said Findlay. “So we think that if we change the external pH or CO2 this influences the internal pH and CO2 conditions, causing a disruption to these normal physiological processes.”

“It’s a problem for some copepods because they don’t have complicated systems for dealing with this, that’s the same for many other organisms, not just copepods,” Findlay continued. “Some organisms are able to adjust proteins or ion exchange to counter-balance the shift, but this generally requires more energy.”

The researchers in the Arctic. Credit: Martin Hartley-Catlin Arctic Survey

Findlay’s findings mirror studies that have looked at temperature response in an array of organisms, and found the normal temperate range of a species can be used to predict its reaction to potential changes.

“The fact [that] this also applies to the pH or CO2 conditions makes sense because a lot of internal processes are dependent on the external pH and CO2 conditions and so if an organism experiences a wide range of these conditions we would expect it to be able to cope with that shift,” Findlay notes.

Although troubling for smaller and more specialized species, the potential for resilience among those that are more generalized is good news. However, the nature of future Arctic ecosystems remains uncertain.

“Certainly there will be species that can survive these changes,” said Findlay. “This is just one more piece of the jigsaw, and there are still many parts that need to be filled in. The ecosystems are likely to shift with both warming and acidification, indeed for Arctic species there are many stressors that will play a part in determining what the ecosystem will look like in the future.”